DEE WILSON CONSULTING
Book Review:
Excellent Look at China's Inner Workings
Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future
Dan Wang (2025)
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Dan Wang’s book is by far the best discussion I’ve read in recent years of modern China’s economic and political system. Wang’s book also contains a cogent analysis of the differences between the Chinese and U.S. economies and cultural mores and what these differences portend for the future. Chinese leaders have made their aspirations clear in strategic planning documents that reflect actual fiscal commitments and goals in a way that is impossible in the U.S. where a presidential election can upend and reverse priorities and budgetary commitments.
The main theme of Breakneck is that China is an engineering society run by leaders trained as engineers who value public work projects such as building bridges, highways, airports, hydropower plants, housing, cars, high speed rail, solar and wind energy, as well as weapons, rockets for space travel and AI robots. Wang states: “China is an engineering state, building at breakneck speed, in contrast to the United States' lawyerly society, blocking everything it can, good and bad. “ And: “Breakneck will illuminate the astounding progress and dark underbelly of the engineering state.”
Wang describes the capacity of modern China to build and manufacture: “Since 1980 ... China has built an expanse of highways equal to twice the length of the US systems, a high speed rail network twenty times more extensive than Japan’s, and almost as much solar and wind power capacity as the rest of the world put together."
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He continues, "... A rule of thumb is that China produces one-third to one-half of nearly any manufactured product, whether that is structural steel, container ships, solar photovoltaic cells, or anything else.” However, the Chinese government favors construction of big projects while sometimes ignoring infrastructure vital to quality of life. Wang comments: "Nowhere in China is it advisable to drink tap water."
Wang compares China’s ability to build 800 miles of high speed rail, the Beijing- Shanghai line, in three years from 2008-11, for a cost of $36 billion dollars, to California's inability to build 800 miles of high speed rail (Los Angeles to San Francisco) in seventeen years, at a cost estimated to reach $128 billion before its completion in the early 2030’s.
According to Wang, China steadily improves its infrastructure through massive public works projects, including infrastructure in rural areas, while U.S. infrastructure is in “pitiable” condition, “barely maintained and rarely expanded,” according to Wang. He comments: “Americans live today in the ruins of an industrial civilization,” which sounds like an exaggeration until one drives through the U.S. Midwest or other former manufacturing hubs in Trump country. Wang asserts that modern China resembles the U.S. of a century ago, with huge manufacturing complexes that make everything from smart phones to cars, batteries and solar panels. China’s leaders are invested in practical applications of AI, including the development of robots utilized for a wide range of purposes, not in fantasies of a super Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) that can carry out any and all economically productive activities.
China has built an excess of housing, so much that property values collapsed. The country currently has the capacity to produce sixty million cars a year, about a third of which are electric cars, even though only about half of Chinese-made cars are sold in China's domestic market. Worldwide, approximately 90 million new cars are purchased each year. China has the capacity to greatly reduce the purchase of cars made in Europe and Japan. China's productive capacities threaten other economies even when Chinese products have not cornered the market. Wang asserts: "China would be better off if it built less and built better." However, he adds that Americans should be slow to criticize the Chinese tendency to keep building: "Because there is perhaps one thing worse than an overactive state that can't stop moving - and that is a state that can't move at all." The U.S., Wang suggests, has become increasingly incapable of big projects that take political will and persistent funding and effort over decades. Wang asserts that China spent 13.5% of GDP on infrastructure in 2016 vs. about 3% of GDP in the U.S.
Wang argues that China and the U.S. have different ideas regarding how technological progress is achieved. He writes: "Americans expect innovations from scientists working at NASA, in universities, or in research labs. They celebrate the moment of invention .... In China .. tech innovations emerge on the factory floor, when a new product is scaled up into mass production. At the heart of China's ascendancy in advanced technology is its spectacular capacity for learning by doing and consistently improving things. " Chinese companies embrace process knowledge, i.e. how to make a valuable product at scale. They are less interested in inspired genius' who discover something new.
Wang comments that “The greatest trick that the Communist Party ever pulled off is masquerading as leftist.” And “the state is enacting a right wing agenda ... administering limited welfare, erecting enormous barriers to immigration and enforcing traditional gender roles, “ combined with low taxes, mostly regressive taxes on consumption, and no widespread use of property taxes. According to Wang, about 10% of China's GDP goes to social spending vs. about 20% in the U.S. and 30% in Europe.
As Wang makes clear, in its building projects and disastrous social engineering projects such as the “one child” policy, China moves fast and breaks things, including breaking people. He states: “ the fundamental tenet of the engineering state is to look at people as aggregates, not individuals. ... It's philosophy is to maximize the discretion of the state and minimize the rights of individuals. “ Environmental concerns rarely stand in the way for long of huge hydropower projects that have tremendous environmental impacts. There is a U.S. model for how modern Chinese society operates, i.e., Robert Moses re-engineering of New York City’s roads, bridges and parks from the 1920s through the mid-1960s. Move fast, tolerate no political obstacles, break communities and neighborhoods, leaving behind an array of tangible public works for posterity is the Chinese way.
Chinese leaders face many challenges:
a) a birth rate that has fallen to 1.0 child per woman (the replacement rate is 2.1 per woman), the disastrous result of past social engineering that
targeted population growth
b) a heavy handed way of regulating industry that stifles innovation
c) a social ethos that prioritizes manufacturing while limiting consumption and,
d) political leadership determined to suppress dissent, leading to horrible blunders such as locking down Shanghai for two months during the
COVID epidemic.
Nevertheless, China has made commitments to long term goals that puts the country in position to challenge U.S. hegemony in world affairs, in AI development, in space and militarily. First and foremost, China makes massive investments in a wide range of infrastructure, including in rural areas that, over time, has transformed Chinese cities and rural areas with visible evidence of Chinese progress. In contrast, the U.S. has allowed its infrastructure to gradually fall apart, with minimal investments in rural America. China carries out large building projects in reasonable time frames, while the U.S. ties up builders with regulatory frameworks. China has a surplus of housing, while the U.S. has not found a way to greatly increase affordable housing through the private market.
China has reined in tech companies, preventing these companies from gaining political power while the U.S. has done the opposite. China has achieved global dominance in renewable energy, while the U.S. under the second Trump administration has doubled down on fossil fuels, one of the dumbest and most self destructive policy mistakes in U.S. history. China has become a country that excels at manufacturing and building, while the U.S. has lost its manufacturing ethos and initiates tariff wars. China seeks out and cultivates scientific talent, while the Trump Administration treats academic scientists and public health experts as class enemies.
Wang writes: “China, right now, is in the midst of pursuing its own Great Society, where even the poorest provinces have impressive levels of physical dynamism. " “ While the American government, meanwhile, has been mired in ineffectualness.” Wang believes that China, under Xi Jinping, has alienated its creative class, many of whom aspire to leave the country, “But Xi can still count on momentum from China’s many strengths to push the engineering state to achieve astounding building feats over the next decade.” The Communist Party in China, Wang asserts, continues to have broad based popular support because “The Chinese have seen their conditions of life improve immeasurably.”
Wang believes that the pluralism of the U.S. continues to be its major asset, which offers Americans the opportunity to “figure out the right solutions” to the country’s economic woes and political divisions. It remains to be seen whether the U.S. can reverse the country's disastrous, decades old self destruct trajectory , or watch the American pluralistic ethos further weakened by economic decline among middle and low income families, as well as internecine political conflict.
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-- Dee Wilson
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